Big Ben

Ben Jeapes interviewed by Stephen Hunt. The author speaks about penning cracking reads like 'His Majesty's Starship' , the differences between writing SF for the young adult market and the 'grown-up' sector, and the sadness of shutting the doors at his own publishing house, Big Engine.

SH: Are you currently writing full time now, or are you fitting in the odd day-job for variety?

Astonishingly enough, I’m back in a full-time day job for the first time in four years and loving it. There seems to be a frighteningly servile part of my nature that likes to be told what to do, though there’s also a less surprising part of my nature that likes decent PAYE salaries, paid holidays and final salary pensions.

The fact that the job also involves writing is just gravy. (Specifically, it’s Documentation Officer for UKERNA, who run JANET, which is the part of the Internet that links UK academic institutions. If your domain name has an .ac.uk in it then you’ll be a JANET user.)

SH: When and why did you begin writing? When did you first consider yourself a writer?

When: at school. Why: had stories I wanted to tell. When did I first consider myself a writer: after I started selling stuff. It seemed a good sort of criterion to use.

SH: How has becoming a published author impacted your lifestyle?

You soon develop a liking for champagne ...

It means about five hours less sleep a week than I would usually get, because I discovered long ago that full-time work and writing only really mix if you do the writing first. Which means getting up early. If you’ve got the time and energy in the evening to write, then fine, but there’s only one way to guarantee you’ll write something that day. So I make myself get up an hour earlier than I would usually be comfortable with, and do it.

Otherwise, the only visible impact is an increased reticence about what you do in your time off. Not that I’m embarrassed, just that I know most non-fans have absolutely no idea how to respond to the news that you’ve written an SF novel. ‘Is it like Star Wars/Trek?’ is a popular one, simply because it’s the only common ground they can think of. Though it’s slightly more meaningful than ‘How many chapters?’.

SH: Do you tend to read the work of many other SF/F authors, and what are you reading now?

I’m currently averaging about a chapter a night, so I have to be selective. I’m on SF/F authors at the moment simply because I’m working my way through a bottomless pile. If the first chapter doesn’t entertain then I move on. Currently reading Pratchett’s ‘The Wee Free Men’, which definitely does entertain. I have a strong suspicion that the Chalk where Tiffany Aching lives owes a large debt to Salisbury Plain (where Pratchett lives), and that’s an area I know well, which increases the enjoyment.

SH: What's your favourite SF/F movies and TV at the moment?

Pauses, while tries to think of last decent SF movie seen. Can’t, so has to consult video collection. The ORIGINAL ‘Star Wars’ trilogy. ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’. A flawed but unsung classic: Disney’s ‘The Black Hole’, not for the story or cute robots but for the sets – that fantastic derelict spaceship and looming, brooding Maximilian. ‘Forbidden Planet’. ‘The Abyss’. ‘The Matrix’ (there should have been only one). Does ‘The Iron Man’ count? (Hope so ...)

But TV at the moment sucks. Dead Lord God, does it suck. I only get terrestrial channels, which at present have not one good SF show on (or even one bad one), no Simpsons... hang on, I tell a lie. There’s ‘Angel’, my interest in which is rapidly draining out of the soles of my feet. I’m giving the fourth series a few episodes to claw it’s way back from the direness that was the end of the third, and if it doesn’t then it’s out.

The whole Big Falling Out With Wesley was a plot point generated entirely by the need to have a big falling out with Wesley and nothing else. It totally failed to arise from any of the natural reactions of the characters, or a natural consequence of the action. Not one of Angel’s so-called friends did what any of them would have done a season ago, which is tell him to GROW UP.

‘Farscape’ was priceless but its cancellation actually wasn’t much of a surprise. There’s only so much any show can do before it’s time to move on. And I’m only cautiously optimistic about the forthcoming ‘Dr Who’ relaunch. It’s being run by fans and fans have a horrible tendency to destroy the thing they love (vide John Nathan-Turner’s entire run as producer of the show). On the other hand, they’re fans with a pretty good track record.

Channel 4 are irritatingly showing no imminent signs of running the next series of ‘The West Wing’ or ‘The Sopranos’, which is a shame.

And, oh, criminy, there’s Wimbledon and the Olympics looming again, isn’t there? Time to break out the Dr Who video collection again, I think.

SH: Do you use an agent?

Only technically, in that my agent placed my first novel, ‘His Majesty’s Starship’, with Scholastic. He then stepped back because he didn’t like their contract, but didn’t want to prevent the publication of my first novel. A very honourable thing to do. And he hasn’t been involved since, as since then I’ve always dealt with the same editor (David Fickling), even though he’s now with a different company.

That has changed recently as I’ve been earning extra pennies with hackwork – children’s adventures with the plot already written, just requiring a writer to write it – and he’s represented me there.

SH: How long did you spend in rejection letter hell before you were first published?

Depends where you start from, really. I suppose it took about three years from first submission of a story in earnest to Interzone to be published for the first time, even though it wasn’t in Interzone when it happened. (It was David Barrett’s edited collection ‘Digital Dreams’, and David Pringle pointed me at it, so IZ still counted in the process.)

Looking back, I have no idea how I found the energy, but I do remember churning out story after story and bunging them at Brighton. These were the days, children, when IZ had a reasonably fast turnaround and editorial feedback was good. (And those days might be upon us again, of course.)

Getting a novel published was a lot less painful. My agent-to-be already represented other members of my writers’ group, and he asked for first refusal if any of the rest of us wrote a novel. I did, he liked it, he placed it with a publisher. Who turned out to be Scholastic, but no one’s perfect. Still, we’re talking five years from when I first sat down to write chapter 1, to it hitting the bookstands.

And to all of the above, add another four years if you’re going to count from when I first started writing in earnest, which was after school. The university thing happened, and an unfortunate experience with my first year exams told me I should shelve the writing for the duration and concentrate on the degree.

SH: Did you always want to be a writer?

As much as I wanted to be anything. I can’t remember when it crystallised and it probably got sidetracked by a deluded idea that I should go into the armed forces. (This is a common delusion suffered by a lot of army brats. I entirely exonerate my parents from blame, because they didn’t exert an atom of pressure. This masochistic impulse to do something I knew I would hate was all mine.) My ability to string two words together coherently is about the one skill I have always had faith in.

I don’t think I ever wanted to be a *full timeSH: writer. Apart from the previous comments about salaries etc, it’s bloody lonely. And I’m much more productive when the writing is forced into an available space in the framework of the rest of my life. Paradoxical, but true.

SH: Where, when, and how do you write?

Far too early in the morning (q.v.), sitting in front of the computer with my back to the window. Actually that’s just because of the way the room is laid out, but it’s fortunate. At weekends, if the day is just too nice or the evening long, then I might just do some writing on the laptop instead, working in the living room so I can at least look out of the window.

SH: Did you come up through the writing short-stories route, or did you get published in novel-form first?

It was the former, though I’m not sure there’s actually a connection between writing the short stories and writing the novels. There was certainly meant to be. I suppose there is, because as previously mentioned the short stories led to my acquiring an agent. However, I never really made such a splash as a writer that the world was crying out for Jeapes in the long form.

There are people who miraculously blossom out of nowhere as fully fledged novel writers. China Mieville, Steph Swainston, Justina Robson ... I don’t know how they do it (and I’m sure it didn’t feel like miraculously blossoming out of nowhere to them.). Unless you’re a genius, I would still recommend at least trying the short story route. It helps you practice your writing skills and disciplines much more quickly. If a 5000 word story fails, you’ve (probably) wasted less time than you did with a 100,000 word novel that failed.

SH: How would you quickly summarise your upcoming novel 'New World Order' for someone who hasn’t read the book yet?

I would quote the cover blurb kindly donated by John Whitbourn: ‘A spectacular firecracker mix of SF, parallel worlds, 'what-ifs' and English history. Cromwell, cavaliers and machine-guns !’. Not forgetting airships, trolls and a thousand elephants - well, a couple of woolly mammoths. I thought it was about time someone wrote a novel dealing with our civil war – we actually had three in quick succession – rather than the Americans’. May I take this opportunity to direct readers to its web page: www.sff.net/people/ben-jeapes/nwo.

SH: If 'His Majesty's Starship' was going to be made into a film, who would be your dream producers/actors for the movie?

Ooh, good one ... I could cast the film quite easily with a group of complete unknowns, because many of them are based on people I know. Or at least, people I know provided the starting points for their characters. But they’re not actors.

I suppose Captain Gilmore would have to be Russell Crowe, whom I’d never heard of when I wrote the book. I’d suggest Claudia Black (ditto) for Commander Dereshev, except that she already plays a younger character in the sequel, ‘The Xenocide Mission’. Otherwise I’d leave it up to the casting agents.

I’ve never paid a great deal of attention to who the producer of a film is. Spielberg in non-cute mode could do the job, I suppose. Tarantino ... maybe not. Yer best bet might be Straczinsky, provided someone else did the dialogue and the humour.

SH: Would you ever consider writing in a different genre, or are you content with science fiction?

I would consider it, the problem being I don’t really know other genres. I might find myself doing an Attwood, reinventing a wheel that has been known to the cognoscenti for generations. The alternative would be to invent a genre of my own, though I’m sure to anyone who knew me it would continue to look like sf. I’d dearly love to come up with a plausible twenty-first century version of Simon Templar. Or a British Jack Ryan. Or something of that ilk.

SH: What are the differences between writing SF for the young adult market and the 'grown-up' sector.

I would say that the level of sex and violence is obviously going to be less ... except that it’s not that obvious. I’m very lucky to be with David Fickling Books, and the eponymous David doesn’t patronise younger readers. I recently read one of his non-sf books, a contemporary story called ‘The Shell House’ by Linda Newbery, during which the 17-year-old protag loses his virginity fairly graphically, mostly to convince himself and his best friend that he isn’t gay. It comes with some quite vivid descriptions of the physical sensations involved in sexual intercourse, up to and including the money shot. ‘His erection was a salute to the night sky ...’ Hmm.

Compare and contrast with Scholastic, who frowningly changed a ‘sod it’ in the original draft of HIS MAJESTY’S STARSHIP to ‘Damn it’. (We compromised on ‘nuts’.) I suppose the difference is that David aims at a slightly older audience and trusts the kids to make their own buying decisions. Scholastic aims at a younger audience and is too afraid of their parents. Especially American parents.

Where was I ...

Oh yes, the differences. In some ways, the writing between the two should be very similar. Any story should be told with a minimum of fuss and redundancy. Younger readers are impatient with waffle. So should older readers be.

However, for the same reasons you would never get something like PERDIDO STREET STATION published in a Y/A market. Not because of the content but because of the length. It emphatically doesn’t bang on and waffle – there’s a lot of writing, but the quality is such that you don’t notice the quantity – but it could seem that way to an inexperienced younger reader.

SH: What are your hobbies?

Apart from the writing, y’mean? Take that away and there wouldn’t be a lot left ...

Well, it would leave a lot more time for the reading. Also the church work – I’m involved in the teenage youth groups (I think it’s coincidence that I officially write for that age group) and I’ve written sketches for performance. Sometimes I even lead services.

SH: What advice would you give to budding SF writers?

Read widely. Terry Pratchett always advises reading outside the genre and I would entirely agree – you have to know where your literature is coming from. But also read within the genre. Keep up to date. At Big Engine I was often getting submissions that were essentially the author’s One Big Idea, carefully nurtured since their teens. Unfortunately they were in their 30s or 40s by the time they found the time and confidence to start writing, and the idea was old hat. The style was old hat. Everything was old hat.

And the usual stuff. Use sensory data – bring your scenes alive. Have a point to it all – there must be a reason you’re describing this period in the protag’s life. Throw in some tension to keep things interesting – just because characters are on the same side, it doesn’t mean they all see eye to eye. Make things happen for a reason that arises from the story, not just because the plot requires it.

Then there’s the actual approach to the publisher. Be professional. You have to remember the publisher will take a different view to you on the fact that you have a manuscript. To you, it’s the greatest thing ever. To them, it’s just another manuscript. ‘You’ve written a novel? Well hot diggity, doesn’t that make a difference,’ they might say.

That means, find out their submission guidelines and stick to them. Check the web site. I lost count of the number of enquiries about submission guidelines that came in by e-mail. If they had e-mail, they had web access, and they could have found out exactly what they were after without bothering me, because the guidelines were on the web. If you can’t handle a simple web search then my gut feeling is you’re probably not going to write a particularly good sf novel. It’s not all nuts and bolts and cyberpunk, but it is a technophile literature.

Of course, the publisher might not have a web site, or might not have the guidelines published. Fair enough. But find out.

Publishers aren’t particularly interested in used goods. I got a lot of submissions from authors who had already self-published their novel on the web? Why? Afraid it’s not good enough for publication? Not a great advertisement. And the fact that you’ve written seven other novels besides is frankly irrelevant, unless they have been professionally published and got reviews. That is an advert for the writer.

Sometimes I would get the opening chapters of a novel and a synopsis of the rest that bore no resemblance whatsoever to what I had just read. ‘Ah,’ would come the reply, ‘I’m setting up the characters for later novels. This novel isn’t really about them ...’

So, leave them out. Don’t think in terms of a series, think of terms of this one novel.

(My favourite example of how to build up a secondary character properly is found in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles stories. Numerous characters start small and become important later on. Take Simon Illyan, who has one later novel - ‘Memory’ – almost to himself, second in prominence only to Miles. But he starts with a walk-on part in the first novel, ‘Shards of Honor’, and that is only once the book is well underway. That’s how you introduce characters who will later become important.)

Some budding writers say they can’t do synopses at all. But if that’s what your publisher wants, learn.

Your (prospective) publisher might insist on hard copy. You might find this hopelessly luddite in these days of electronic everything. Tough – send hard copy. One of us is going to have to print it out, i.e. spend money on something we might well not publish. You have a good reason why it should be me? Along with the 99 other manuscripts I receive that month?

Thought not. Let the trees die.

Don’t be a prima donna. The publisher might make suggestions for changes. A good publisher will only make reasonable suggestions. Remember that it is 100% a buyer’s market. No manuscript is worth the hassle of dealing with an awkward author, or an idiot. All they have to do is drop you and find someone else. So don’t be awkward or an idiot.

A good example of my correspondence with someone who was both can be found at www.sff.net/people/ben-jeapes/crank.htm. An extreme example, but entertaining in its own way.

There is so much more that could be said. Check the SFWA web site (www.sfwa.org) for all kinds of useful articles.

SH: Are you from the 'writing tightly against a full outline school' or the 'make it up as you go along' school?

More the former than the latter, though not as much as I should. I know the beginning, I know the end and I generally know a few highlights along the way. Stringing them together is the challenge. I’ve certainly never been able to make it up as I go along – that just leads to waffle.

SH: How much do you base your characters against people you actually know?

A lot! I’ll often use an actor for the physical description of a character, and someone I know for the habits, mindset etc. However, that’s just a starting point for what happens. I don’t (usually) have a one-to-one correspondence between personal acquaintance and person in book; it rather hamstrings what you can do with the character, for one thing, and it would be disrespectful, for another.

SH: When it comes to your drafts, how much do you tend to re-write?

Not a great deal. Of course, I go back many times and re-examine what I’ve written, cutting a bit here, adding a bit there. Sometimes (though it’s heartbreaking) quite large chunks need excising because I see that they just disrupt the flow of the book. (I then put them on my web site for anyone who’s interested, a bit like DVD extra features.) But there’s not a great deal of re-writing because I had a reasonably good idea where the book was going from the start.

That said, ‘New World Order’ has about three different beginnings, all saying much the same thing from different points of view. I got there eventually.

SH: Of the work you've penned, what's your favourite novel to date been?

I love ’em all! But I suppose the one I feel the warmest about would always have to be ‘His Majesty’s Starship’, just because it’s my first-born.

SH: What amount of research do you do for your books?

I like to know what I’m talking about. ‘New World Order’ has a number of scenes set within a day’s journey of Oxford, so I visited the locations to get the geography right. If I’m using a historical personage then I should get their basic details and their character right. I also read up quite a bit on the English Civil War.

Otherwise I’ll probably go no further than the local library, or my prized complete edition of the 1912 Encyclopaedia Britannica. And since I got writing, the web has become a fantastic research tool.

I didn’t know that much about current faster-than-light theory when I was writing ‘His Majesty’s Starship’, so I asked a couple of scientifically minded friends to come up with an FTL system. It didn’t have to be detailed, but it had to be plausible. There had to be limitations on what you could do with it - you couldn’t just turn it on like they do in Star Trek. So they came up with a system based on what we currently know/believe about wormholes, to which I could add further arbitrary limitations, because for all we know they could be true.

SH: How long does it take you to write a novel?

They’ve all averaged out at a couple of years, from starting to write to delivering the first publisher draft. The actual time taken, added together, is a matter of weeks, but I couldn’t just write it over a matter of weeks even if I had the time. A vital part of the process is taking time off, letting things stew and brew in the back of my mind. And I’ve usually been having ideas for at least a couple of years before I even start writing.

SH: How much of your working day do you devote to SF/F fiction these days?

A minimum of an hour a day, approx. 7-8 a.m. – see the above bit about getting up early. (And that’s when I’m not writing email interviews instead ...) If I can then write in the evenings too, that’s gravy. But I make sure I also have a life.

SH: What new material are you working on at the moment?

Once the hackwork is done then it’s back into space for me, though not in the same milieu as ‘His Majesty’s Starship’ and ‘The Xenocide Mission’. I enjoyed them, but I find it increasingly hard to take navies-in-space seriously. So a new, standalone novel, possibly leading to a series, possibly not ... No title yet and I’m only 20,000 words in, so it will be a while.

SH: What made you want to set up your own SFF publishing imprint?

I didn’t, especially! I wanted to set up my own imprint, yes. I also wanted it to be in a safe, non-fiction professional field, because that’s the easiest thing to sell to. But when I unexpectedly lost my job (first week of January 2000; I’d had better centuries) I had no contacts in any handy non-fiction professional field that wasn’t already adequately covered. So, SFF it was - a subject I was nicely familiar with. And that led on to the philosophy of mixing reprints with new authors – giving other new authors the breaks I’d been very lucky to get myself. Or trying.

SH: What was Big Engine's policy and thoughts on e-books?

We never published any, but in principle I thought they were a good idea and they were definitely on the To Do list. (I personally can’t understand why anyone would want to read a novel that wasn’t on paper, but I do know such people exist, so they should be catered for.) The editorial philosophy for an e-book should be much the same as a treeware one. The imprint of the publisher on the cover, or whatever you call it, should say just as much about the quality of the contents as it does on a real book.

SH: Were you approached by agents, and what was your attitude to them.

I was approached, but not much. With what I could pay, an agent’s 10% really wasn’t going to make them rich.

What was annoying was the times I was dealing quite nicely in good faith with an author who had made the first approach, and then the agent wades in and stirs the mud up. I really didn’t have time for that.

SH: How did Big Engine's foray into Print-on-Demand stack up against using traditional short-run printers? Which firms did you use and what was your experience with them?

Big disadvantage of PoD – no economies of scale. Each copy costs exactly as much as every other copy to print. A publisher needs free, disposable giveaway copies for publicity. You only get those with a short run, where the unit cost is nice and low. So, PoD gave me the confidence to get started, but I very soon switched over.

I only used one firm for POD, Lightning Source. My experience with them breaks down pretty concisely into: dealing with US office, like pulling teeth to get them to do it right; dealing with UK office, excellent, never a hint of a problem. I believe the UK office has a proudly framed copy of Dave Langford’s ‘The Leaky Establishment’ – the first Big Engine title, and the first to come off their presses in this country.

For Big Engine’s traditional short run printing, I used Biddles of Kings Lynn.

SH: The higher priced, limited edition work seems to becoming a staple diet with many small press houses. Is this just because it's the niche that fits best with the economics of short print runs?

Yeah, I suppose ... There are also collectors who like that sort of thing, I believe; I’m not a collector and have never understood that mentality. I wanted my copies to be as cheap as they could for the benefit of readers. Though in retrospect, perhaps the high priced limited editions would have been a better bet.

SH: What was your experience like with Big Engine’s fairly direct to reader distribution policy?

No problem, really. It was a lot easier than having to chase up invoices with booksellers, who tend to be very bad at prompt paying.

SH: Did you ever try to contact any of the big wholesalers and retailers, and if so, what was their attitude to Big Engine?

Waterstones are the devil incarnate where small presses are concerned. They have a massive market presence and aren’t afraid to use it, frankly, with quite unreasonable demands for discounts etc. That’s where the wholesalers come in handy: Waterstones can deal with them and getting money is the wholesaler’s problem.

No major problems with any other retailers, and the wholesalers themselves (by which I mean Bertrams and Gardners) were quite friendly, though again, not great at paying promptly. I tried to get in touch with T.H.E. but never got any response to phone calls or emails, so decided I had better things to do.

SH: Selling direct, did you find a healthier appetitive for Big Engine’s works in Europe or across the pond in the US?

Most of my sales were in the UK, followed by the US, followed by a handful in Europe. The fact that the Europeans all speak different languages might have had something to do with it.

SH: If you could turn the clock back to before you started Big Engine, what would you would do differently?

Get a partner (at least one) and some proper investment. Spread the load a bit. I was trying to do way too much for one person to handle.

I would also not take unsolicited submissions. The thing about ‘give other authors the breaks I got’ is all very well, but you just get swamped. I could have done just as well through personal approaches to likely prospects.

SH: What feedback did you get from your published authors? From our perspective, Big Engine's shuttering seemed to be done as honourably and cleanly as such things can be done.

Well, thank you. It wasn’t completely tidy, but when you’ve taken someone’s money and raised their hopes, the least you can do is be nice about letting them down. All my authors seemed to appreciate what I’d done for them, as far as I can tell. And in the annals of small press history, making it to two and a half years is pretty good ...

SH: The small-press often publishes less commercial books; high on art and often high on production quality, but lacking what the marketing gonks call legs. Do you think that's a conscious reaction to the reading-by-numbers material that frequently comes out from the major imprints? If things had gone differently would Big Engine have ever let rip with a page-turning space opera if you thought the copies would fly off the shelves?

Absolutely. Small presses tend to match the vision the bloke in charge has. If they like arty stuff then that’s what the firm will publish. I like good reads, so that was what came out of Big Engine.

And Big Engine was poised to let rip with the page-turning space opera – Charles Stross’s ‘Festival of Fools’, now available (and Hugo-nominated, grinds teeth) as ‘Singularity Sky’.

SH: How did you filter Big Engine's slushpile?

Slowly. As previously mentioned, I should have done without it at all. I asked for the first couple of chapters and a synopsis. If I liked them, I asked to see the whole thing. Even so, there were way too many complete manuscripts piling up on my floor, and it would take weeks to get through just one.

SH: What was the size of the Big Engine's slushpile ? did it surprise you, either in terms of quality or quantity?

The quantity didn’t surprise me but the quality did. I don’t just mean bad writing – we’ve all been there. My own first submissions to other publishers were badly written, because I needed to develop as a story teller. However, I can honestly say the grammar and the punctuation were spot on, and have been since I was about ten. But not this lot. There are people who just can’t write.

SH: How did Big Engine scout its talent?

I had a short list in mind when I got started: books I wanted to reprint, and books I’d already read as manuscripts and which I knew were good. It didn’t take very long for word to get about and authors to start coming to me.

SH: How did your contracts with authors differ from that of the likes of the Tor’s and Penguin’s of the world? Did you have to stick in the normal small-press break clause along the lines of: ‘If you turn out to have written the next Harry Potter, it's okay to jump ship to one of the corporate imprints and leave us behind.’

I’ve never seen a Tor or a Penguin contract. I tried to take a cut of perhaps more rights than other publishers would, but still with the lion’s share going to the writer. I consider it entirely reasonable. Consider: the publisher publishes a book, entirely at its own risk and expense. The book attracts the attention of a studio who want to buy the rights. In many conventional cases, the publisher won’t get a penny of that rights sale, despite having been the one to spend the money and take the risk that made the sale possible in the first place. I don’t think that’s right.

I didn’t want to be a dog in the manger and I didn’t try and take rights I would never be able to use. I just wanted something for everyone.

SH: How much did you copy-edit the works of your authors?

Not a great deal, because a well-written manuscript shouldn’t need it. It will probably need to be brought into the house style – ‘analyse’ or ‘analyze’? Italics for emphasis (too many, too few)? And so on. And there’s always the continuity errors that have slipped through. So, a light dusting of copy editing, nothing more.

Sometimes I’d get a manuscript with a letter proudly announcing that it had been professionally copy edited and was ready for publication. Hmm, yes, well, I’ll be the judge of that.

SH: What kind of print runs was Big Engine pushing out (if that's the right word for a POD edition).

If memory serves – too lazy to call up the spreadsheets and check, even though they’re just an icon click away - I’d print about 500 copies at a time, short run printing on a traditional press. The most successful title, ‘The Leaky Establishment’, pushed itself up into four figures with repeated POD reprinting, in increments of between 50 to100, I think.

SH: Has being a publisher made you appreciate the other side of the coins as far as some of the gripes you may have had as a writer are concerned?

It always has. I’ve been in publishing since the late 1980s – about as long as I’ve been writing – and the one has always informed the other, in both directions. Another good reason why I always try to play it completely straight with both sides.

SH: What role do you think writer’s workshops and author’s support groups can play in a writer’s existence?

Absolutely essential, in my experience. You need informed feedback, from people who don’t love you and who can see your faults, perhaps with more clarity than is comfortable. You need the brainstorming, you need the shoulders you can cry on, you need the encouragement, you need the contacts. I got all of the above, from regular Milford attendance and from the group I go to each month. It’s a lucky author who makes it on their own. (It’s not impossible, but it’s unusual.)

SH: Do you think being a SF writer yourself made you a better publisher?

A better publisher of SF? Maybe. It goes (should go) without saying that an SF publisher should know SF. But if I hadn’t been at least a fan of SF then I wouldn’t have gone into that field in the first place ...

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OTHER CONTENT - June 2004

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Neal Asher Interview Psychologically disturbed android killing machines. A Beast that harvests people to research its genetic dabbling across time by sending them back to the primordial ages. A mysterious Japanese man still living millennia after Hiroshima. A physicist that uses nanotechnology to merge with a spacecraft. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Neal Asher. (INTERVIEWS) Big Ben Ben Jeapes interviewed. The author speaks about penning cracking reads like 'His Majesty's Starship' , the differences between writing SF for the young adult market and the 'grown-up' sector, and the sadness of shutting the doors at his own publishing house, Big Engine. (INTERVIEWS) Just a Tad More If Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow & Thorn series is "the fantasy equivalent of War and Peace" (Locus magazine), then Tad must be Fantasy's Leo Tolstoy. The prolific Mr Williams is cornered for some vodka and a chat. (INTERVIEWS) Bruce on Bruce The father of cyberpunk - or at the very least the Uncle - Bruce Sterling, chats about his new technothriller, The Zenith Angle, with real-life security expert Bruce Schneier. (INTERVIEWS) Forty Whacks Scots SF author Ken Macleod visits sunny Spain for the second installment of 'Stitch and Split: Selves and Territories in Science Fiction', in Seville, sponsored by the Universidad Internacional de Andalucia. Take a walk with Ken down the Latin road to SFF. (COMMENT) Eight Days in Zagreb Our jetsetting Scots SF author Ken Macleod flies out to Croatia as a guest at the Sferakon convention. He finds the old world of Yugoslav science fiction intriguing, from the pulp cover translations of Western SF novels to state-sponsored SFF societies. (COMMENT) The Weird Tale of 'Pulgasari' Mark takes a look at the fantasy film Pulgasari; featuring a beast which was a North Korean giant monster who ate iron and grew to hundreds of feet high. It's director was kidnapped from South Korea, taken to North Korea, imprisoned for four years with no explanation, and then forced to make the only Marxist monster movie. (ARTICLES) Godsend In Godsend, Frank finds a run-of-the-mill child-cloning thriller turned into a flaccid frightfest that is all clumsy thumbs, and no controllable finger to decisively point this devilish dud of a movie in the right creative direction. (FILM REVIEWS) Shrek 2: Frank's Take In Shrek 2, we are gleefully reunited with the amiable pot-bellied giant and his colorful crew of supporters that include his new wife Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) and his old sidekick Donkey (Eddie Murphy). (FILM REVIEWS) Shrek 2: Mark's Take There is distinctly less magic and fun in Shrek 2 as the title ogre has problems becoming accepted by his in-laws. All the same cast is back with the same voices, but the tone of the film is darker and we don't learn a lot more about the characters that we liked in the first film. (FILM REVIEWS) Van Helsing: Mark's Take Not as bad as it might have been, but still no bargain. This is a fast-paced and overblown CGI-fest that leverages off of the old Universal monsters but does not actually want to use them. Writer-director Steven Sommers of the 'Mummy' films handles action scenes well, but is poor with directing acting or even giving us a very good story. This is a film of dubious thrills and no chills whatsoever. (FILM REVIEWS) Van Helsing: Frank's Take In this film, our Frank finds an exceedingly glossy but empty-headed thrill-seeking monsters mash mishap that boasts competent big-budgeted special effects but little else. (FILM REVIEWS) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Mark uncovers quite probably the best new science fiction film he has seen since Minority Report and well before. A device allows for the removal of painful memories by erasing them. The hitch is that the memories must be opened and partially relived as they are being erased. Charlie Kaufman's third script is demanding, but it is delightfully engaging, intelligent, and even profound. (FILM REVIEWS) Troy Despite the showcasing of buff bodies clashing with conviction in this historic sword and sandals fable, Troy is an elaborate action-adventure yearning to sweep the moviegoer off their feet but the uneven rhythms sullies its energized scope. (FILM REVIEWS) Offworld Report June 2004: Science Fiction and Fantasy Interviews with Peter Crowther, Steven Brust, John Jarrold, Neil Gaiman and the stars of Van Helsing; JG Ballard considers disaster movies, Stephen Baxter dishes the dirt on the writing secrets of SF, and Octavia Butler ponders the nature of power. (NEWS) Offworld Report June 2004: Weird Science The Pentagon's science fiction weapons program (railgun warships, anyone?), space tugs, a robot built out of DNA, NASA's wilder dreams, the fantasy folk seen in Scotland, and why we should be begging China for a decent space race. (NEWS)

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